Music : Jazz

American history. Born of oppression and built upon improvisation, it transcends racial divisions and continuously evolves with the times. Originating in New Orleans, jazz migrated north during the Roaring Twenties, ignited by the Hot Jazz of Louis Armstrong. During the Great Depression, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson brought the captivating sounds of Harlem nightclubs to dance halls across the country and helped usher in the Swing Era. As music tastes changed and rock and roll emerged during the 1950s, Miles Davis initiated a new era in jazz, and a legacy that lives on today. American Popular Music: Jazz follows the history and development of jazz through the years, monitoring a genre in musical history that remains vital and dynamic to American popular culture as we know it. more...

Price: $67.00

Combines cultural theory, biography, and musical analysis to shed light on Monk's music and on the jazz canon itself. This book shows how the work of this nonconformist composer emerged from the jazz world's fringes to find a central place in its canon. It considers how Monk's stature has grown, from the narrowly focused wing of the avant-garde. more...

Price: $21.95

As music columnist for The Nation, Gene Santoro has established himself as an important new critical voice, able to write well on a broad spectrum of popular music and jazz without losing touch with the cutting edge of today's music scene. About Nat "King" Cole, Santoro comments: "adjectives can't describe the swinging, ingratiating self-confidence laced with tenderness that colors Nat "King" Cole's singing. His baritone/tenor is so airy and elemental, so palpably physical, it invites you in, then surrounds you glowingly..." And on the highly successful rock band Living Colour, Santoro is no less evocative: "hardcore metal raveups slam into bluesy ballads and psychedelicized pop, lilting Caribbean inflections collide with hiphop scrambles of prerecorded material and touches of funk." Dancing in Your Head gathers Santoro's liveliest reviews and essays for the first time, introducing a fresh and provocative perspective on several decades of musicians and their work. Santoro covers a wide musical vista, from the legendary blues singer Robert Johnson to Public Enemy's controversial rap lyrics, from the long running clash between blues and African American gospel to the rock iconoclast Neil Young, from the great James Brown to George Hay, the founder of the Grand Ole Opry. Documenting the evolution of jazz, rock and roll, and rap, Santoro's observations are incisive, honest, and reflective. Of his early exposure to Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Bela Bartok, Santoro remarks, "That sense of wonder and discovery is what happens when you've been hit by art's immediate vatic power. It has never left me, has been touched and renewed by each encounter I've valued." Santoro examines the staying power of music legends Lou Reed, Eric Clapton, the Grateful Dead, and Sun Ra, the freewheeling jazz artist who prefers to call himself a tone artist rather than a musician. Special highlights include several pieces on Miles Davis; book reviews, including one on Gunther Schuller's two-vo more...

Price: $18.95

F. Scott Fitzgerald named it, Louis Armstrong launched it, Paul Whiteman and Fletcher Henderson orchestrated it, and now Arnold Shaw chronicles this fabulous era in his marvelously engrossing book, appropriately called The Jazz Age. Enriching his account with lively anecdotes and inside stories, he describes the astonishing outpouring of significant musical innovations that emerged during the "Roaring Twenties"--including blues, jazz, band music, torch ballads, operettas, and musicals--and sets them against the background of the Prohibition world of the Flapper and the Gangster. The Jazz Age offers an insider's view into the significant developments and personalities of the jazz age, including the maturation and Americanization of the Broadway musical theater, the explosion of the arts celebrated in the Harlem Renaissance, the rise of the Classic Blues Singers, and the evolution of ragtime into stride piano. It also contains a bibliography, detailed discography, and listings of the songs of the twenties in Variety's "Golden 100" and of films featuring singers and songwriters of the era.  more...

Price: $19.95

From its beginning, jazz has presented a contradictory social world: jazz musicians have worked diligently to erase old boundaries, but they have just as resolutely constructed new ones. David Ake's vibrant and original book considers the diverse musics and related identities that jazz communities have shaped over the course of the twentieth century, exploring the many ways in which jazz musicians and audiences experience and understand themselves, their music, their communities, and the world at large. more...

Price: $15.95